Book Review: The Water Museum: Stories by Luis Alberto Urrea

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Water Museum: Stories by Luis Alberto Urrea is a collection of thirteen stories many of which have been previously published.

Dystopian futures, climate change, the immigrant experience and immigration politics, and cross-cultural experiences and relationships, are only a few of the themes explored in this creative collection of short stories.

Among my favorites in this collection is "Mr. Mendoza’s Paintbrush”, an amusing story blending humor and magical realism featuring a Mexican graffiti artist who paints the walls of the city with his cryptic messages. I also enjoyed the very first story “Mountains Without Number”, a moving story tinged with nostalgia featuring the inhabitants of a dying town and their memories of a time long past. Another favorite of mine in this collection is “Amapola” in which a white boy’s love affair with a Mexican girl puts him in a difficult position when the girl’s shady family enters the equation. “The Sous Chefs of Iogua” is an exceptional story set in rural Iowa that focuses on the changing demographic and delicate balance between the white residents and the Mexican immigrants. “Welcome to the Water Museum,” is set in the dystopian West and describes a school trip to a museum featuring water in all its past forms that inspires wonder and disbelief in the children being raised in an era where drought is an everyday reality and brings back memories for their adult chaperones.

Written in beautiful prose that transports you to the vividly described setting(s), I enjoyed all of the stories (in varying degrees, as in most collections) in this collection and loved the variety of themes and tones with which they have been written. Though a few of the characters appear in more than one story, the stories themselves vary in tone, theme and setting, and at no point in time do you lose interest. The author writes with deep insight and compassion and each of his stories, though deceptively simple conveys a strong message.

I had been wanting to read this author for a while now and I’m glad I picked this collection of stories to begin with. I look forward to reading Luis Alberto Urrea’s full-length novels.